These are delicate times, in the Church and in the world. Our blessed Lord has already told us how to understand the state vis á vis the Church: Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s. Yet this can be treacherous when the emperor offers to deal God into the game, but wants to keep full control of the deck.
The appropriate response to authority always requires discernment – even more so, when the authority in question is a saint. After I published my last article, a friend and colleague whom I respect offered (perhaps somewhat guarded) praise or congratulations for “having taken on Thomas” – that is to say having challenged, not only St. Thomas’s embryology (which nobody really defends) but the anthropology in which it is involved. This revolutionary anthropology founded the Church’s understanding of the soul as the substantial form of the body (a formulation that was shocking, even scandalous, when Thomas expressed it; that it was declared as doctrine less than fifty years after his death is testimony to its power). To this day, it serves as the philosophical and theological foundation for understanding core teachings of our faith, such as the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul. Obviously, I would never challenge any of that – indeed, I am deeply devoting myself to the work of making it better understood and more appreciated.
Thomas’s anthropology was – and is – a work of genius, “weld[ing] together Plato and Aristotle precisely at the points where their doctrines were mutually opposed,” as Ratzinger put it in his Eschatology. However, it is also deeply entangled in a net of conflicting burdens and commitments – burdened not only with the limitations which remain in the hylomorphic, form-matter model even after the substitution of the substantial soul (which is at once and equally the ordering principle of the person and something real in itself) for the Aristotelian entelechy (which has no existence of its own, but is simply that which actualizes the body), but also with ideas about the roles of men and women in human reproduction that not only contradict empirical biology, but were a priori and unfounded even at the time Aristotle proposed them; committed not only to the indispensable doctrines mentioned in the last paragraph, but to additional, more speculative theological claims, such as tracing a literal genealogical heritage of original sin and establishing an understanding of the creation of the rational soul ex nihilo far more absolute than anyone would today, to the extreme of according the creation of human souls and bodies to different times and different principles. The adjustments needed to accommodate these latter claims imperil the cohesion of the entire system and distort our understanding of the human person.
St. Thomas was the greatest theologian in the history of the Church. He clearly knew to distinguish what was focal – the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body, without which we are of all people most to be pitied – from peripheral questions such as how original sin is transmitted or even how God creates rational souls, which (if I may say so) is a mystery pertaining more to the action of God than to the lives of humankind. Thomas never intended as central to the thought he was developing the points that a long line of theologians (Ratzinger prominent among them) have questioned. Far less did he intend to elevate in isolation the kind of pre-theologate ethics manual version of the ordo amoris that Vice President Vance cited and which was the immediate occasion of the whole discussion in the last article.
Truth is not simply a matter of asserting the right propositions. From of old, the Church has held to the virtue of oikonomia (in its extended sense): a prudential reserve in keeping what was known as “the discipline of the secret.” While it may seem as if these “silent mysteries” were somehow veiled to catechumens in a spirit of gnostic concealment, an authentic theology must rather accompany the exposition of doctrine with pastoral attentiveness to the person and disclose Christian truth within a sacred ethos, offering intellectual formation and communal initiation concomitantly. Creed and congregatio are indispensably mutually informing; no one, however orthodox or well-trained, can be a church of one. Such is a wrong theological anthropology.
As Paul has written elsewhere, the contemporary world has a wrong philosophical anthropology – and it is hardly possible to develop an appropriate theological anthropology from below inside such a wrong philosophical anthropology. Thankfully, the Church herself offers the theological anthropology we need: a whole-life anthropology, one which attributes unique and individual personhood to all genetically human bio-organisms at all stages of development. A person is a person. Whoever is a person, has never been anything other than a person, and never will be anything other than a person; in fine, in the anthropological sphere, humanity and personhood are everywhere inseparable, admitting no differences in degree. They cannot be dislodged, one from another. All humans are fully and wholly human and fully and wholly persons. This anthropology is found, quite conspicuously, in Humanae Vitae – I say conspicuously, though it has been little noted and less understood, either by supporters or detractors of the document or of the embattled, sainted pope, Paul VI. (Much more on this to come, at a later point.)
On seeing Humanae Vitae invoked, a casual reader might expect the hot-button, culture war questions to arise. In this case, such a reader would be right – but not in the way or for the reason he would likely be thinking. This phenomenon – being “right,” but for the wrong reason – might be trivial in this case, but in more serious matters can be fatal, as we shall see.
It would be easy for this stereotypical culture warrior to cast the last month as involving a number of “wins” (the HHS “two-gender” declaration, reinstatement of the Mexico City policy and Hyde Amendment enforcement). Such a view, I fear, would reflect the kind of utilitarian thinking that cannot sustain, much less build, respect for life in a society. It is easy enough to deduce here, not a reversal of the culture of death agenda that has preoccupied so many Christians for decades, but an entirely different and equally dangerous – indeed, more dangerous – culture of death, a culture of depersonalization.
Consider, for instance, JD Vance’s frequent and at times caustic insistence on offspring and biological family as the privileged witness of commitment to the future. Even in isolation, this could not fully be squared with Christianity – I would encourage the Vice President to look up Matthew 19, 12. Yet taken in combination with the Trump IVF executive order and the opinions and actions of the man who is certainly the wealthiest and arguably the most powerful figure in this entire Administration, his words would appear (however he intends them) to be incorporated in an agenda that is pro-birth in a way that is worse than indifferent to family and the protection of innocent life. The vile opinions of peripheral figures serve only to make the climate worse. I am, of course, not implying that the Vice President is responsible for all of the above, nor even that he fully subscribes to all of its manifestations. He is, however, a highly visible public Catholic who is (theoretically, at least) second to the President as all of this is taking place – and there is some reason to believe that he is capable of knowing better. I hope, for his own sake and for all of our sakes, that he will, soon enough.
Or consider the IVF declaration itself. Pro-life forces have thematized that there are as many as 1.5 million frozen embryos trapped in manmade limbo and the commodification of human life that IVF entails; the Church has made her position clear. All of this is true. Yet even were it not so, the entire process by its nature introduces confusion into parenthood itself, which devolves onto the state to adjudicate. In a recent case, a woman who bore and bonded with a baby was obliged by law to surrender that baby to his genetic parents – a situation which became known only because the woman and the baby happened to be of different races. This absolutization of bloodline over every other possible form of maternal or biological relationship is dehumanizing for all parties involved; meanwhile, the woman unjustly forced to relinquish the baby has no way of knowing where or whether her biological offspring has been born, or ever will be born, which deprives the state-sponsored formula even of consistency.
The HHS gender declaration is likewise problematic, as the history of this issue shows that some of the most vocal defenders of that position are interested solely in the preservation of social norms, rather than the needs or well-being of persons. For instance, the Alliance Defending Freedom advocated in support of European laws requiring persons who wished to change their legal gender status to undergo invasive (and intrinsically immoral) surgeries, including sterilization. Genuine Christian concern for persons would follow the exact opposite course, accompanying persons suffering a crisis of gender identity in their moral, psychological, and legal struggles, while discouraging them from irreversible acts of self-mutilation. The only explanation for such behavior is a will to complicate and burden the process of legal gender reassignment (a process, it should be noted, with no ontological implications whatsoever), even at the cost of materially grave sin and evil, untold anguish, and mutilative violence to real, living, suffering persons.
In 2008, Pope Benedict XVI declared that “the distinction between religion and politics is a specific achievement of Christianity.” Even a brief reflection on the last few passages above shows some of the peril involved in wielding the blunt instrument of the state in promotion of “Christian morality”; Caesar can offer law, but not grace. Yet even this fails to take into account the threat of a retrofitted metaphysics built around preordained conclusions; this threat remains whatever one’s motives might be, even a putative obedience. On the level of statecraft, such imprudent rationalizations may at any point paint even well-intentioned Christian protagonists into an indefensible or dangerous corner. Yet there is something far more deadly on the horizon.
A Christianity which is attached to political means and ends has surrendered its claim to religio vera, true religion. This is not a mere formal consideration; any such metaphysical retrofit is all but certain to generate willy-nilly a new “Christianity,” especially in a time such as ours, with media rampant and theology in retreat. Popular piety, in itself necessary and often praiseworthy, is always at risk of redefining the faith in its own image; civic religion, as we have written elsewhere, is a consequent, thought-out commitment to do the same. We must understand – and justly fear – the potential effects of these two forces taken in combination and integrated one with another. It is incumbent upon us all to see the danger to the Faith here; these times call for fidelity, holiness, and great, great discernment.
Although this post was written in the first-person singular (in my person), it was a fully cooperative piece. -Val
Image: cgb, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Dr. Paul Chu is currently a philosophy instructor for CTState, the Connecticut Community College, and has previously taught philosophy in college, university, and seminary settings. He also served as a staff writer and editor for various national publications. He is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport dedicated to honoring the beauty and holiness of God through artistic and intellectual creativity founded in prayer, especially Eucharistic contemplation. He contributes regularly to https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/.
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
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